Welcome to the 14th Fiver Christmas Awards. Or is it the 15th? Oh, we don't know. We've certainly disingenuously pretended to forget how many times we've held these awards at least a dozen times, so there's a starting point for anyone who cares enough to tot it up. Furthermore, it's now more than a decade since we awarded Bayer Leverkusen an unprecedented Fiver Christmas Awards quadruple, and in honour of their legendary coach Klaus Toppmöller (kids, ask your grandparents) we declare that now is a time for cigarettes and booze. And curly hair, with locks springy enough to hold a lit cigarette, just in case you have a can of Purple Tin and a quadruple gin on the go at the same time. But as well as it being time for cigarettes and booze, and hairstyles specifically designed to assist in the consumption of cigarettes and booze, it's also time to dole out a few awards. Mainly because we sense you're losing interest already, and if we don't start soon, the Fiver will be in your bin folder quicker than we can say "Gah!", "Wah!" and "Oh reader! How could you!"

Angry Shouty Pointy Arsenal Man, who announced that "either the board must go or Wenger must go" in the wake of his team's opening-day defeat at the hands of Aston Villa. Angry Shouty Pointy Arsenal Man's team currently lead the Premier League and are safely through to the knockout stages of Big Cup.

THE JIM WHITE AWARD FOR PLAYING IT DOWN IN A QUIET VOICE

Luxuriously moustachioed Sky Sports News reporter and silent-movie pastiche act Nick Collins, for falling off a ladder and out of shot while reporting from outside Wembley Stadium. "Now that's the kind of thing that you hope never happens to you on live television," announced Jim White, back in the studio and for once not making a ludicrous song and dance about the smallest thing, heroically managing not to guffaw in the face of his fallen comrade's bizarre slapstick showcase. Rumours that Collins was later spotted wearing brown overalls and a bowler hat while trying to push a piano across a busy North Circular were never confirmed.

THE NANI STATUE FOR SELF-AGGRANDISING FALSE IDOLATRY

In the wake of his strikerless West Ham side's 3-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur, Big Sam Allardyce blew a long and lengthy solo on his own trumpet of such tonal clarity that you could have been forgiven for thinking it had been scored by Gil Evans and produced by Teo Macero. The tactical mastermind proved it was no fluke by sending his team out to win one of their next nine Premier League games.

Honourable mention: Mike Phelan, for claiming he was effectively United manager for the last five years of Lord Ferg's reign. If this really was the case, David Moyes owes him a proper shoeing in the 'Glasgow Didact' style. Look at the state he left the gaff in!

THE DAVID BENTLEY AWARD FOR MOST OVER-HYPED YOUNG PLAYER

An eye-catching 20-minute spell on the wing for Manchester United against hopeless Sunderland was enough to earn Adnan Januzaj a nomination for BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year. It also had the FA, various pundits and lots of football writers falling over themselves in their efforts to get the 18-year-old into an England shirt. The only small problem? Januzaj is not English and has not spent anywhere enough time in England to qualify to play for them under residency rules. Perhaps most pertinently, he has never expressed the slightest interest in playing for England. As difficult as some of our more jingoistic tabloid johnnies might find it to believe, there's really no earthly reason why he would.

THE MATT LE TISSIER AWARD FOR FOOTBALLER WHO FAMOUSLY NEVER MISSES A PENALTY MISSING A PENALTY

Mario Balotelli, who is obviously not eating enough pre-training Bacon & Egg McMuffins to keep up his energy levels like the great man did.

THE LORD FERG MEMORIAL MANAGER OF THE YEAR AWARD

Paolo Di Canio. Just like the quaaludes necked by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill in upcoming Scorsese debauch-fest The Wolf of Wall Street, fitness regimes sometimes take a while to kick in. And look! There's Sunderland beating Chelsea to the tape right at the end of 120 minutes of Rumbelows Cup quarter-final action! Turns out banning coke floats made with frozen mayonnaise instead of ice cream wasn't such an outlandish plan after all. Well done, Paolo! (Hey, if Roberto Martínez gets all the credit for Brendan Rodgers winning promotion at Swansea, and Phelan cops all the flak for leaving Moyes a task and a half, then everyone's pal Paolo should get props for Sunderland's first cup semi in 14 years.)

THE ROBERTO DI MATTEO AWARD FOR REPLACING TACTICALLY INTRANSIGENT MANAGERS WITH ONES WHO KEEP IT SIMPLE BY STANDING ABOUT LOOKING A BIT MOODY

Scotland, who went on an unprecedented streak of two wins in a row this year, having got shot of confused chalkboard scribbler Craig Levein in order to replace him with the perpetually irate Gordon Strachan. Ruling by fear clearly works wonders.

Honourable mention: The Republic O'Ireland, who borrowed the fear idea but may have taken it a bit too far.

THE TOM DALEY AWARD FOR SERVICES TO DIVING

Either of his spectacular tumbles against Crystal Palace (forward somersault in the pike position) and Real Sociedad (reverse one-and-a-half somersaults followed by two-and-a-half twists in the free position) would normally be enough to win Ashley Young this gong. But the two combined make it no contest! Truth be told, he should get an extra shiny award for having the sheer brass neck to hold referees responsible for his issues with gravity. "The referees are giving decisions and that is where I think it lies," he told reporters, before accusing the police of encouraging a crime pandemic by wearing uniforms, and Lord Justice Leveson of tapping his phone.

THE SIR TIM BERNERS LEE AWARD FOR SERVICES TO THE INTERNET

Former Sheffield United midfielder-turned-boxer Curtis Woodhouse. A day or two after losing a fight, he offered £1,000 to anyone who could help him identify a Twitter troll, then jumped in his car and drove around to the bloke's street, while keeping his followers updated on his progress as he zeroed in on his online abuser. Upon seeing Woodhouse tweet a photo of his street sign, big, brave 'Jimbob' simpered pathetically for mercy and admitted what he had done was wrong. Having whipped Twitter into line, hopefully Woodhouse will go one better in 2014 and deal with the entire internet once and for all, pulling the plug out with his big fists, packing it away in bubble wrap, and storing it under the stairs until somebody works out a way for it to be used sensibly.

Union Jack Wilshere, who had some explaining to do after taking to the world wide web to tell followers that "the only people who should play for England are English people". We think we know what he meant, but that didn't stop the inevitable angry mob, led by over-sensitive former cricketer Kevin Pietersen, taking up their cyber-pitchforks and rattling the gates of Wilshere Towers.

THE CRAGGY ISLAND CHINESE COMMUNITY AWARD FOR MAN IN A POSITION OF RESPONSIBILITY BEING ACCUSED OF RACISM

The toys came flying out of das bundeshipsterpram in September after Borussia Dortmund goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller was sent off at Napoli in Big Cup. All of a sudden, Jürgen Klopp began dancing around in scenes reminiscent of the time George Costanza was denied the nickname T-Bone by a fellow worker at Kruger Industrial Smoothing. And in one fell swoop, cracks began to appear in Klopp's painstakingly constructed facade of supercool. Could it really be that he's Just Another Manager, prone to irrational and childish touchline tantrums like Fergie, Mr Roy, Big Sam and the resolutely unfashionable rest of them? Surely not! Across the continent, hipsters circled the wagons and haven't spoken of this since.

THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE FOR BEST WORK OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Always Managing: My Autobiography by 'Arry Redknapp, an account of one man's life that couldn't contain more made-up cobblers if it featured a man with a big beard and sandals on the cover and was called The Holy Bible.

THE TONGUE-IN-BUTTOCK-CLEFT AWARD FOR EXTREME SYCOPHANCY

The British football press pack, for collectively burrowing their way up Lord Ferg's colon upon his retirement, despite the big bully's barely disguised contempt for them over 20 years. They were at it again upon the publication of his latest memoirs, a tome in which the former Manchester United manager made it clear in no uncertain terms how little he thinks of a media he found ridiculously easy to manipulate.

THE SPANISH INQUISITION AWARD FOR BEST INTERVIEW

Channel 4 newsreader and journalist Jon Snow, who showed the football writers how it's done by reducing Lord Ferg to a squirming, jibbering, quietly seething wreck with his intelligent line of questioning on the day of Ma Bookie Wook's release.

THE MICHAEL CARBERRY AWARD FOR KEEPING A STRAIGHT BAT WHILE ALL AROUND HAVE TOTALLY LOST THEIR NOGGINS

Perhaps mindful that he wouldn't presume to embark on a tour of newspaper offices with a view to teaching journalists how to copy and paste things off Twitter, Big Sam Allardyce is clearly not particularly open to the media lecturing him about tactics. Quizzed over his team before West Ham's game against Manchester City, his one-line response was a correspondence-ending work of malevolent beauty: "Well, it hasn't got a false nine, that's for sure." It was delivered with a thin-lipped smile followed by a gorgeous hanging silence, and you didn't have to squint too hard to read between the lines: mention a 4-2-1-3-0 formation to him once, just once, and 4-2-1-3-0 will be the number of times he will toe-punt you squarely on the trouser zip. That's a lot of punts on the zip! Hats off to the man for drawing a line in the sand.

THE 'GREAT BRITAIN' AWARD FOR OXYMORONIC PREPOSTEROUSNESS

Football hipsters. It's time to stop now, you've had your fun, but you're killing football. Nobody's asking for a return to the days of A-jacks and Joo-ventus, of smashed-up train carriages, or of Saint and Greavsie's funny old game. But we've got to the stage where match reports read like the program code for Jet Set Willy, discussions in pubs are increasingly sounding like an audiobook of the program code for Jet Set Willy, and more television time is set aside for Eintracht Braunschweig than Nottingham Forest. It's all very clever, but then so was Tales from Topographic Oceans and Never Mind the Bollocks is 10 times the LP. The Fiver's simple folk, and we'd love a bit of old-school three-chord thrash, some witless long-ball fun (remember fun?) with maybe a brawl thrown in, preferably involving 21 Arsenal and Nasty Leeds players. Where are the Charles Reeps and George Grahams when you need them?

THE JOHN INVERDALE AWARD FOR SERVICES TO BRAIN-IN-NEUTRAL BROADCASTING

Joe Kinnear. The Newcastle director of football gave an idiosyncratic interview to TalkSport in which he claimed responsibility for signing Tim Krul (a Graeme Souness signing) and James Perch (Chris Hughton); got Derek Llambias's name and job title wrong (calling him Llambeeze and failing to realise he's in charge of cleaning the bogs); and mispronounced the monickers of Shola Ameobi, Yohan Cabaye and Hatem Ben Arfa. It was the start of a difficult summer for Kinnear which ended with the poor bugger getting more pelters, this time for not lining up any signings other than the season-long loan for QPR's Loïc Rémy. But who's laughing now, huh? Rémy has scored eight goals in 14 appearances for the Toon, who are looking good at the moment, unlike say Spurs, who disrupted their entire team with 987 needless new signings. Wise old Joe! Also, as regular Sunday morning listeners will attest, there hasn't been anything quite as entertaining or erudite on TalkSport since.

Manchester United. It's over. (OK, they're going to put together a 19-game winning run in the new year and retain their title; of a prediction the Fiver has never been more certain. But let us take this opportunity while it presents itself, huh?)

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